Michael's Musings #7 (11.August.20) - You Can't (Hand-)Check Me
Timeular, Walking A Marathon Because of Anki, Building Intellectual Bridges & Hunter S. Thompson
Preamble: Per my last update, my newsletter will serve more as a postcard than a place to host my long-form writing. I’m currently writing a piece on hand-checking in the NBA and how that relates to the haters in your everyday life that you have to learn to swipe off. I’ve had a lot of fun writing it and I’m hoping it comes out in the next week!
In true postcard fashion, I’ll update you on the foundational parts of my life, including what you may have missed last week and what to look forward to in the coming weeks. Inspired by my pal Roxine, I purchased a Timeular die. Here’s their 47-second video on how it works.
I’m definitely still learning how to use it (I forgot to switch it from “Eating” yesterday and it now looks like I’ve committed to a new diet—Intermittent Fasting’s cousin, Never Fasting where I ate for 18 straight hours).
Here are the 8 priorities I decided would start on my Timeular die:
Basketball/Exercise
Self-explanatory and also doubles as the time I spend with my perennial workout buddy John. The two of us also pen the basketball newsletter That’s Tough. If you’re not subscribed, you’re not a hooper. Simple as that.
silly billy bean time
this the sole item on my cube that is completely in lowercase and for good reason. it’s special and is very important to me. i want to make sure that the time i share with my partner is protected and i’m looking forward to getting an accurate sense of how much focused, unbroken time i spend with her.
Creating
Morning Pages, Newsletters, Articles, Tweets as well as conversations I have with folks brainstorming and refining my ideas. This is probably the reason I invested in the Timeular cube — I wanted to make sure that I found at least an hour every day to delve into protected creation. Right now, I’ve been struggling considerably. Many days I wake shy of my 6:30 AM time slot and find myself trying to wriggle out 15 minutes of frantic creation in the morning before the duty of medicine calls. This surely has to change and Timeular’s insights on where my time goes will be a good start.
Medicine
These days, I’m committing to memory all of the bugs (i.e. bacteria, viruses, parasites and not-so-fungi) and drugs (i.e. TamiFlu, Albuterol Inhalers, Cocaine and of course, everyone’s favorite palivizu-HowDoIPronounceThis-mab). That means doing flashcards on a spaced-repetition software called Anki. Since this last week, I’ve also been walking while doing the 700 + flashcards daily and jeez, my Apple Health walking metrics are off the charts.
This time also includes lectures, lab meetings, research, etc. Anything that will make me a better doctor goes here and by far, it’s the biggest chunk of my days, taking > 6 hours/day (or so I think until Timeular proves me wrong).
Eating & Errands
I told myself that when I graduated from college, I will have achieved financial freedom when I can afford a personal chef. I am happy to announce to everyone here that I’ve finally made it. Although my mother has volunteered to be my personal chef, my stipulations say nothing about how much the personal chef has to cost. Jokes aside, I’m beyond grateful that for now, this part of my schedule consists mainly of short bursts of time eating nutritious, scrumptious Vietnamese food and driving to-and-from UCLA to run errands.
E-mail
This is the second reason I bought the Timeular die. By forcing me to turn the die when I begin working on something, I am fully aware that my time is being tracked. And so, when I’m spending an inordinate amount of time unnecessarily sifting through e-mail or by watching YouTube/Netflix that I actually don’t really enjoy (no rules or restrictions for content I LOVE like the God of High School), I have to physically acknowledge that I’m using my time in ways I don’t want to. That pressure has proven rather powerful and I’m hoping to contain e-mail to 30 minutes a day at 3:00 PM. This slot gives my inbox enough time to accumulate and gives a response at least an hour and a half before the end of the business day for people to act on.
Processing Batched Tasks
I’m not quite sure how to use this block quite yet and am considering just changing it to “leisure.” The problem with this category and many others is that I often overlap different parts of my life. I walk 5 miles while doing 500 Anki cards, eat while enjoying silly billy bean time and process e-mail while stuck in a far-too-slow medical school lecture.
This is usually reserved for the fringe tasks on my ToDoList, which I capture with Roam.
In this list of tasks, those fringe tasks would probably be to tell my tutor Kenneth what material I got through that week and read through the Ultrasound Biofilm paper that my lab manager Zara sent to us this week. On other weeks, it may be to call the credit card company to dispute charges or to manage rebates for massage chairs. As you can see, many of these things overlap with other sections so I’m not 100% sure how useful this category is quite yet.
Reading
Near religiously, I’ll start and end my days with 30 minutes of Kindle reading. My parents are the proud owners of this full-body massage chair—the same ones Brookstone sold when NSYNC was topping the Billboards. I sink into the worn fabric and curse when the rollers press too close to my spine but otherwise, I’m currently enjoying Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series. I am in LOVE with the world-building and find myself wondering what I’d choose to do if I were in the predicaments of the Red-turned-Gold Darrow. Here’s Wikipedia’s brief synopsis of what the series is about.
It has been seven hundred years since mankind colonized other planets. The powerful ruling class of humans has installed a rigid, color-based social hierarchy where the physically superior Golds at the top rule with an iron fist. Sixteen-year-old Darrow is a Red, a class of workers who toil beneath the surface of Mars mining helium-3 to terraform the planet and make it habitable. He and his wife Eo are captured after entering a forbidden area and are arrested. While she is publicly whipped for her crime, Eo sings a forbidden folk tune as a protest against their virtual enslavement. She is subsequently hanged on the orders of Mars' ArchGovernor Nero au Augustus. Darrow cuts down and buries his wife's body, a crime for which he is also hanged. However, Darrow awakes to find that he has been drugged and delivered into the hands of the Sons of Ares, a terrorist group of Reds who fight against the oppression of the "low Colors". They have adopted the video of Eo's song and execution as a rallying vehicle for their cause. Darrow joins the Sons when he learns that Mars was already terraformed centuries before and that the Reds have been tricked into perpetual servitude and subjugation.
Darrow is conscripted to impersonate a Gold and infiltrate the Society to bring it down from within.
✏️ What I’m Working On
Source: SB Nation
School of Hoops: You Can’t (Hand-)Check Me
I’ve started to really just own what I’m interested in. Simply put, I love basketball, productivity, and anime (although ironically, I’m not quite ready to put that in the foreground yet… if you want someone who does, peep my boy Alex Hugh Sam).
I find myself realizing that basketball is deeply intertwined with many parts of my life. My medical school application was largely built on my experiences playing, refereeing and coaching basketball. My lifting schedule is predicated on making me a better basketball player and well, I’ve just turned 23 and still haven’t stopped disappointing Danni @dmills3288:
And no Danni, that wasn’t a cross-over, it actually was an Inverted Euro. And you fouled me. That’s AND-1.
The very first post in the School of Hoops series will be about hand-checking, formally defined as:
Hand-checking: “A defender may not place and keep his hand on an opponent unless he is in the area near the basket with his back to the basket. A defender may momentarily touch an opponent with his hand anywhere on the court as long as it does not affect the opponent's movement (speed, quickness, balance, rhythm).
As an aside, if you want to “study” basketball, I found an interesting Quizlet slide deck that had hand-checking as one of its cards. I’m guessing it’s useful to tell a player, verbatim, the rule of hand-checking if they start barking in your face.
Hand-checking’s interesting because it divided the NBA into two distinct eras: one where post-players dominated and another where perimeter ones shine. In 2005, hand-checks were near completely curtailed and referees were told to err on the side of calling hand-checkings over swallowing the whistle.
Of course, some games today are chippier than others and referee teams decide how they’re going to officiate the game. As long as it’s consistent on both ends, teams don’t have much to complain about.
The key metaphor I’m making in this article is that hand-checking is analogous to the obstacles in one’s life. Even if they’re illegal in the NBA rulebook, tough defenders like Patrick Beverly will start every game hand-checking aggressively to set the tone. If you, as an offensive player, let him get away with it, he’ll hand-check you the entire 48 minutes until the final buzzer sounds.
You can’t depend on the referee to bail you out, especially if they swallowed their whistle during the early parts of the game—they feel an immense pressure to be consistent. So, you have to learn to continuously swipe through hand-checks or create situations where you physically can’t be hand-checked. If you stop at any time, you know Patrick’s going to rest his forearm into your body, insistent on keeping you stagnant.
That’s a primer to this piece—do let me know if you want to share some time this week to walk through it with me. At the end of it, you’ll be as passionate about hand-checking as Russell Westbrook is.
Source: AMAX
💭 1 Thought
It’s Time to Start Building Bridges
Source: UCSD
This is UCSD’s “map of science.” Each node is a cluster of journals grouped broadly by their subject material. Clusters were built on both bibliographic relationships between journals and between keywords.
Clearly, we have the smartest folks in the world pushing the depths of scientific progress. What we don’t have, however, are bridges between these disciplines. They’re far more related and intertwined than this certainly suggests.
We need more interdisciplinary bridge-builders.
Not sold on interdisciplinarity? Perhaps the late Kobe Bryant can convince you. Yes, the Kobe who took up tap dancing to improve his ankle strength, foot speed, and rhythm. The Kobe who studied Bruce Lee's style of martial arts to react quickly while minimizing physical exertion. The Kobe who studied how great white sharks hunted seals, all to shut Allen Iverson down. The Kobe who lost the 2008 NBA Finals to the Boston Celtics and responded by calling conductor John Williams, looking for insight on how to be a better leader.
I’m confident that you are a unique blend of many different interests and disciplines. You may not combine Physics & Earth Sciences, but you may have passions for Biomedical Engineering & Doodling (like my friend Lyna), SQL/Data Analytics & Medicine (like my friend Akiff), Trial Lawyer-ing & Yu-Gi-Oh (like my friend Robbie) or Basketball & Medicine (like my best friend, me).
Look to combine your interests—you’d be surprised by how one can inform the other. If you need a coach, check out this doodle Lyna made of me!
💬 1 Quote
Hunter S. Thompson’s Life Advice:
Source: Reddit
"I am not a fool, but I respect your sincerity in asking my advice. I ask you though, in listening to what I say, to remember that all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it. What is truth to one may be disaster to another. I do not see life through your eyes, nor you through mine. If I were to attempt to give you specific advice, it would be too much like the blind leading the blind."
- Hunter S. Thompson
Before you take his or my advice, consider his qualifier. One man’s truth is another man’s disaster.
I came across this article on Shane Parrish’s blog Farnam Street. This is a reposting of a 22-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, writing this letter in April of 1958 to his friend Hume Logan who asked for life advice.
Thompson’s letter, found in Letters of Note, offers advice more fitting for an 82-year-old who has lived multiple lives, much less that of a growing 22-year-old. No matter where you are in life, you’ll find Hunter’s words humbling and inspiring.
Here are two of my favorite quotes:
On Everchanging Perspective:
When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.
On the Result of Indecision:
Naturally, it isn’t as easy as it sounds. You’ve lived a relatively narrow life, a vertical rather than a horizontal existence. So it isn’t any too difficult to understand why you seem to feel the way you do. But a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.
❓ 1 Question
In our first session of “Doctoring” (a class where we learn the soft-skills of interviewing patients), I got to know my group real well because our faculty member opened up the group with some bombs.
If you’re comfortable, I’d like to get to know you better. Do reach out to me at your earliest convenience.
What’s your greatest regret?
🙏 Infinite Gratitude
I had a conversation with Alex Hugh Sam yesterday about authenticity and this newsletter reflects that—I’m just being me. Derek Sivers, Nat Eliason, and now Alex and I will make fully-fledged careers of being unapologetic about who we are. Refreshing chat and damn, I’m itching to make more time for those conversations.
While I’ve been walking & studying, I’ve decided to leave Post-It notes on some of my old high-school friends’ homes. This Post-It read:
“This is a threat! You will be… OUTWALKED!”
My friend Ali is currently 210 lbs soaking wet (not an accurate measurement) and he has vowed to outwalk me. That won’t happen if the RNA Positive-Sense viruses have a say in it.
Thanks for reading!
P.S. Be sure to follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube for even more of my thoughts. I encourage you to reach out and ask me anything!